


Dreams of Oceans, Dreams of Summer

by lemonsharks



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Eventual Smut, F/M, Falling In Love, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Protective Cullen, Romance, Slow Burn, Sparring, Touching, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-25
Updated: 2016-06-25
Packaged: 2018-07-18 05:40:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7301671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonsharks/pseuds/lemonsharks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bastard girls don't get to fall in love with fetching Commanders. </p><p>  <em>Evelyn Trevelyan had wanted to become a Templar for most of her life. When she's sent to the Conclave as the most expendable of her siblings, she does not expect to find something--someone--greater than that yearning.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Evie dreamt of water tearing at her ankles, sand torn away from beneath her feet. The Waking Sea wet her trousers to the knee and salt dried crisp upon her skin, olive, darker than her family, middle child, odd and out. 

Evie dreamt of water, though her body tore through demon flesh, wet with blood and ichor. A great circling swing of her her sword sliced one beast in half behind the man it was about to kill; their eyes met. Hers and the demon’s, its feathered crest shivering in the chill wind as it disintegrated behind its target. And then the man, who smiled at her and thanked her for his life, thanked Cassandra for the lives of his men, before they all moved toward the Breach. 

Evelyn Trevelyan dreamt of water, green and thick with algae, still water, live and dead at once in the pond two miles’ walk outside the city walls. Full of fish and crayfish and swarming with tiny flies and huge mosquitos, at peace save for their buzz. The water sparkled, crackled, shifted, cleared. She woke with bleary eyes and the memory of the Fade clinging like slime to her skin. 

She blinked hard and ran her hands over her arms; her left palm _hurt_ and she hissed with it, reassured the elven girl she wouldn’t bite, and went to meet the folk who’d wanted her dead the week before. 

The man was there: gold hair and sun-freckled skin, bright eyes. He thanked her for his life again, for the lives _she_ saved, and pressed in a way unlike the others: Chancellor Roderick’s suspicion, Cassandra’s newfound faith, Leliana’s opportunism, Josephine’s determination that this entire situation is better than it might be. 

“She might have been a mage,” Josephine said, “Or any number of people. We really could not have asked for a more convenient Herald.”

Evie kept one eye on the man, who smiled thinly, and she set off for the Hinterlands, set off for Val Royeaux, set her sword to her back and spoke with Mother Giselle and Madame de Fer and the Red Jenny girl and remembered bright, thankful eyes that drifted from her face, framed with black whisps of hair coming loose of their tie, to her hand, marked by--someone. 

By her time in the Fade, she decided. 

He corrected her when she called him _General_ , asked she use his given name, though he called her Herald still. A reminder, she knows, the same way her father has always been _Bann Trevelyan_ or _My Lord_ to her. 

“Do you practice much, with your focus on training our people?” she asked, gesturing to the longsword at his hip, and Cullen smiled. 

Evie could strike a dummy to splinters in a single blow, the result of long hours with her lord father’s guard, with her brothers, with any who would stand against her. 

“As much as I can,” he replied, “Though not as much as I should.” 

“Can I join you, some morning? Tomorrow?” 

“I don’t--I suppose--there would be no harm,” he finished the line in a rush, the chill wind excusing the faint blush that rose to his cheeks, the matching tint on hers. 

The ripple through her chest she discarded unconsidered; she’d no time for entanglements, and only wanted a partner unfamiliar with her techniques. 

That he was tall and broad and smiled with the depth of an ocean meant nothing--not nothing, but little--when so much depended upon her. More than ever had before, this chance to do her family credit. 

Evie dreamt of water, cool and deep and full of fish that swam around her legs and nibbled at her skin, dreamt of hands strong and wide at her waist, the gasp of breath as he pulled her to the surface, sputtering. She dreamt muzzily of cold lips against her cheek, and woke smiling in the chill light before the dawn. 

Wind through the mountains chapped and chafed, and Evie overdressed for a morning of exertion. The men were up, yes, but at breakfast or prayer, and Cullen met her in the open space near the dummies with practice weapons in each hand. Sword and shield for him, greatsword for her, with edges blunt and grips worn from years of concerted beatings. 

They circled and struck. Cullen dodged a blow from her pommel when she danced near, and returned with a strike from his shield that knocked her on her rump. She recovered while he was still far enough away that she could land a simple touch, and she did--to his shoulder. Not a killing blow by far, but one that would tire and annoy in the field. 

She needed to be better.

Their blades clashed and locked when he next lunged for her. For a moment they were very near, Evie on the balls of her feet with her armored chest touching Cullen’s but for the blades between them. 

“I have a dagger at my belt,” she said, “If I were fighting dirty--”

He swept her feet from beneath her and lay the point of his sword just above her throat. 

“This is a war, not an afternoon social,” he said--snapped, really, the words clipped and sharp. 

Evie’s face went hot, and she rolled up to her feet again. “ _That_ was unkind of you.”

“Not if it keeps you _alive_ , Herald.”

He turned toward the weapon racks, a signal they were done. Evie’s heart dropped in her chest, her lungs tight and her mouth set in a scowl. 

Evie dreamt of water: great crashing waves that brought full-sized trees with them to the shore, depositing the trunks and tangled roots on pebbled ground. She dreamed of giants, screaming, and woke with a vice around her heart sweat on her brow, and a chill traveling from her skull to the base of her spine. 

It was early, the dawn twilight not heavy with the night’s cold. She bundled up in layers beneath her armor, gathered the Iron Bull and Sera and Blackwall from their beds and set them out for Therinfal Redoubt. 

She saw Cullen emerging from the Chantry with Cassandra just behind him and quickly turned her back, ears burning. When she next looked up it was to Bull’s keen eye studying her, brow raised slightly, face complacent otherwise. 

“It is too _damn_ early,” Evie muttered, and Sera gave a cheer of agreement to that. 

“Let’s all turn around and go back to sleep, yeah?”

“I don’t think I could,” she replied, and heaved the gates leading out of Haven open. 

At least they had horses now, though Dennet has so far declined to join them. 

She rode at the fore, silent, listening to Blackwall and Sera playing word games that get progressively dirtier throughout the day. After lunch she traded places with Sera, sent Blackwall to the rear, and spent her hours identifying birds by their song in her head rather than pay attention to Sera’s grumbling about how she’s no fun at all. 

Perhaps she wasn’t. She spent more time scowling than talking, though Bull drew a smile out of her when they were all nearly eaten by a dragon. The scolding Cullen had given her stuck with her for far longer than it should--clinged deeper than it had any right to. 

Bull pulled his horse abreast of hers one day on the broad, flat country that made up the Bannorn, Sera and Blackwall bickering pleasantly some yards behind them. 

“He distracts you, and that bothers you,” Bull said, as easily as if he’d remarked on the weather. (Pleasant, bright, hot for this time of year.)

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she replied, and some yards back Sera _laughed_ , long and high. 

As if she were laughing at _Evie_. 

“You’re a really shitty liar, Boss,” he said. “We’ll have to work on that.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m here to close the Breach--I don’t have the _option_ of getting distracted. Besides, I hardly know Commander Cullen.”

The _and yet_ went unsaid. 

_Evie dreamt of water_ : burning torrents of Fade-green liquid, that clinged to her skin and clothes and tore screams from her throat. She dreamt of demons, taking her compatriots souls, eating away at her own. She dreamt of Cullen, killed and caged and _Envy_ , who would take the things she did not even have. 

It called her bitter, acrid, perfectly interesting. 

And perhaps it was right, that she was more a Trevelyan than any of her siblings without a drop of her lord father’s blood. 

She came home with troubling news and allies, to Leliana’s sharp tongue. 

Cullen, for his part, regards her with wide brown eyes and a small smile, as if he had not scolded her so before she’d left. But perhaps the scolding was deserved--yes, no, perhaps she acted like a silly little girl around him, as steady as a butterfly’s wings or drying sheets pulled taut by the wind. 

He catches her alone after she’s had her supper, warm bread and roasted vegetables, a bit of nug stew to mop up with her crusts. He took his seat across from her without asking if she wanted his company, and Evie was ashamed to admit...she did. 

She finished her drink in one long swallow, and cleared her throat.

“Have you come to scold me again?” she asked, voice sharper than she intended.

The words raised a blush on the apples of his cheeks. _He’s embarrassed_ , she thinks, and then, _good_.

Cullen recovers soon enough. 

“To thank you, actually. For seeing something worth saving in the Templar Order.”

“The men and women who fought beside us at the Redoubt deserved better than conscription,” she said. “They deserved the chance to join the Inquisition of their own accord.”

“Nonetheless,” he replied, “you made a bold choice. Doubtless one that will make you unpopular among the mages in our ranks.”

“Yes, Solas has already told me exactly how he feels,” she said. “Madame de Fer at least sees why I made the choice I did. You can’t seize loyalty, even if you think that would be a more expedient course of action.”

He nodded, and made a grumbling sort of sound in his throat. “I also came to ask if--perhaps--you’d like to continue practicing with me. You left so soon after--”

Evie remembered that morning, the look of _disappointment_ in his eyes when he’d taken her down the last time that morning. Was it only a few weeks ago? It seemed an age. 

But tomorrow they would be taking their new allies up to the Breach itself and stitching it closed as she had done with so many smaller rifts. 

Why did she dwell so on a single morning’s interaction, one Cullen clearly thought inconsequential? 

“I was embarrassed, nothing more,” she said. “I--”

Behaved like a child? Tried showing off, to her detriment? 

Evie let the words hang. Cullen rose, and moved his hand as if to rest it upon her shoulder. She caught her breath mid-inhale, but he withdrew before he touched her. 

“--I would like very much to continue, though I hope such training won’t be needed. After we seal the Breach.”

He coughed, and ducked his head. “Likewise, my lady Herald. If such a thing is necessary.”

Evelyn Trevelyan dreamt of water. 

The warm spring that bubbled from the earth beneath her family’s home in Ostwick had always been one of her favorite places. She treaded water in her sleep, soaked in the warmth and safety of it, the light of the bathing room diffuse. 

When she woke, her hand ached along with her chest, Haven little more than a pile of rubble above her. She blinked sand from her eyes and clenched her fists, hissed at the pressure in and around the anchor. 

She shuddered with cold and rose, made her way through rubble and snow along the faint trail of the evacuation, blown almost entirely away by howling mountain wind. Cried when she found smoldering embers. 

Evie dreamt of water, frozen, melting on her skin. 

Cullen was first to her. He knelt beside her and placed his gloved palms on her shoulders, shaking, why was she shaking? 

“Herald?” he said, lifting her carefully from the snow into his lap. 

He shrugged out of his mantle and wrapped it around her, rose with her in his arms. 

“We need to get her to a fire! Now!”

Even after hours in the waking sea on the cusp of autumn, she had never been this cold. Cullen’s body offered a sliver of warmth, and she curled into him for it, murmuring that he should put her down. 

“Can walk myself,” she said, but he shushed her and drew her closer to him instead. 

She could sleep here, safely, with the Breach closed and Cullen wrapped so warm and tight around her. Evie wriggled in his grip and he shushed her, told her to stay awake, then _ordered_ her to stay awake, begged with words like, _We can’t lose you now,_ I _can’t lose you now_ that she didn’t know she’d heard. 

Someone tugged off her boots, and then she heard Mother Giselle’s warm voice shooing Cullen away, felt warm hands taking her from her wet clothes and putting her into fresh, dry ones. 

Evie lay with her face toward a banked fire and soaked in the heat from top to toe, growing at once more awake and more tired for its warmth. Mother Giselle gave her a bowl of hot buttered parsnips with a bit of meat and when she could sit up straight and eat on her own allowed her on a cot, satisfied that she would wake again. 

She did not wake until the shouting of her advisers reached her ears, and she did not see Cullen again until they reached Skyhold and named her Inquisitor.


	2. Chapter 2

Evie dreamt of mountains, when she slept at all. Huge, dagger-bladed things, cutting into the sky, and the Breach beyond to the east, near the spot where Haven once stood. She dreamt of Haven, sometimes, with and without a Solas she couldn’t tell was real or not, and that shook her. 

Most nights she stayed late around the war table with Josephine and Leliana and Cullen at her sides, discussing and planning and making ready for the next big steps. The peace talks in Orlais approached and they still had no invitation; Hawke arrived at Skyhold and they still had no word of her Warden contact. 

She took to the gardens in the quiet hours before work was to begin, some nights not even making it to her bed. She rested better on the road, and plans to set out with Blackwall, Bull, and Sera hung heavy about her while they waited on nobles and penitents to come and gawk at or court the favor of the Herald of Andraste. 

Cullen found her picking aphids from the elfroot leaves in the garden, on his way from morning prayer. He knelt beside her and loosed a weed from near the roots of a tender vine of crystal grace. 

Evie glanced over her shoulder to him; they’d scarcely spoken since their singular game of chess. She wasn’t terribly good, and the sting of being caught cheating stuck with her and raised a blush to her cheeks now. Different, than the first wave of burning cheeks and ears, now. 

“You have a hand for growing things,” she said. 

“I did grow up on a farm, though it’s been years,” he said. Paused. Continued, “I was only thirteen when I went to the Templars.”

“I would have joined the last year. The war changed that plan.”

Cullen regarded her for a moment, hands still working the dirt at the vine’s base. “May I ask what drew you to the order?”

“I’ve wanted to serve all my life,” she said. “To do good. To keep the world safe. For a while I thought I might join the Ostwick city guard, only--hunting bandits and smugglers hardly seemed the thing when--”

“When?”

He watched her with creased brows, dark circles beneath his eyes that matched her own. Another weed came free in his hands; he set it aside. 

“When there are demons the be vanquished, ancient evils to find and crush, when the Maker himself needs mortal help in the world.” 

Evie crushed an aphid, smearing the liquid insides between her fingers. It was sticky. 

“Those are--reasons.”

“What were yours?”

He paused, considering. Plucked another weed and dug his fingers into the soil as if he meant to find his answers buried amongst the roots of the vine. 

“I wanted to help people,” he said at last. “To do good in the world.”

“Noble goals,” she said, smiling. “I--”

“At the time I thought so as well,” Cullen said. He rose and wiped the dirt from his hands, and left Evie with a pile of weeds and that terse farewell. 

Infuriating, confusing man! 

She watched his back as he retreated to the great hall, watched the door closed with deliberate care behind him, and tried to work out the curl beneath her ribs. 

They had practiced together, since arriving at Skyhold, every day before the Inquisition gathered for its midday meal. Blackwall, Iron Bull, and Cassandra joined them as often as not, and frequently Krem and the other Chargers as well. Cullen seemed to prefer her for his individual partner, though he made certain to be teamed with her for melees, fighting at her side or at her back. 

And afterward, while they cooled down from the exertion, they would walk the ramparts and talk of anything and nothing at all. The weather. Their forces on missions out in the field, or recently returned. Of late, Calpernia, for Leliana told the other advisers little and Dagna kept a tight lip when it came to the memory crystal and the vessel of Corypheus. 

Then she would speak of the Templar Order and he would recoil, as he had this morning. Each time she mentioned her ambition--never deliberately, and what other path did a bastard girl have open to her? But the subject arose. How could it not when he had devoted so much of his life to the order that was to become all of hers. 

It made her feel young and silly, though she was past twenty and had learned such a great deal in the last year. 

Like how Cullen made her insides quiver, made her head go light and her belly ache with a nameless want. They’d nearly kissed on occasion--at the ends of those rampart-walks. Him leaning in and her with eyes barely open, until someone interrupted them or he pulled away, thinking better of it. 

She wanted very much to shake him when he did, and each time held back, fought her blush, and turned back to her work. Work that would take her to Crestwood come morning, well away from Skyhold and all its denizens. 

Evie dreamt of mountains, that night, and Hawke with her grim expression and folded arms across her chest. Hawke who had gone on ahead, slipped with preternatural stealth through rows of bandits and horrors from the lake and from the rifts. 

She dreamt of mountains and chill wind on the trip down, gravel loose beneath her feet and slips that made her jolt awake, even long after they had come upon flat ground and easy travel. 

Sera and Blackwall sang ribald verses together, harmonizing in what would have been a rather lovely way if not for their shared lyric tendencies, while Vivienne scowled and sighed. 

“Next time, my dear,” she began, falling back to walk beside Evie in the sucking, ankle-deep mud. Vivienne sighed. “Cassandra and Varric are rather less … tiresome traveling companions.”

They had come to the verse about the man from Denerim, with hands so large he--

“I would say they really aren’t that bad, but I’d be lying. They egg each other on.”

“Quite so,” Vivienne said. 

But they moved flawlessly together in a fight, so that not a single enemy could get past them. Blackwall and herself at the vanguard, Sera darting all over, Vivienne behind laying down a cover of ice and fury. A clever party; she’d chosen them because despite their conflicting personalities, they fought well together, and she needed them at their best if they were to take Caer Bronach. 

But first, Ser Alistair. 

They found him in a cave, Hawke guarding the entrance with her daggers in her hands and in no time at all he had a sword point inches from her throat, with only Hawke’s words between her and a certain death. He had the grace at least to to apologize after his near attack, and to explain exactly what was happening to the Wardens in Orlais. 

“You can see why they would all be in a bit of a panic,” he said, though the levity fell flat. Then he and Hawke were off to the Western Approach, Evie and the others to free Caer Bronach from its bandit occupants. 

They spent weeks at the Caer, and Evie dreamt of mountains, of Skyhold rising above the very clouds, the chilly gales that blew across the ramparts and the weight of Cullen’s hand at the small of her back. Some nights she woke aching and flushed, with her fist between her thighs, and others simply _lonely_. 

She had no _time_ for a romance, and certainly carried no intention of distracting her general with such a thing. No. She had to put him from her mind, to focus on the important things, on slaying Corypheus in such a way that he was well and truly _dead_ , on saving the Empress’s life and--any of the thousand thousand smaller things, no less important, that needed her hand to be done. 

And what would such a dalliance serve her? She had never had time for a lover, focused instead on the training that would make her the best Templar she could be, when she reached her twentieth birthday with no husband and no prospects, fulfilling the deal she made with her mother as a girl. 

Her sisters and brothers had a place at Ostwick, in society there. Even her eldest brother, tucked away in the Circle, recieved dispensation to visit often enough that he was something of a fixture at the house and the soirees their mother put on. And Evie? 

Evie had the look of a dear family friend. She was an _embarrassment_ to her lord father, a disgrace to her lady mother, a reminder of a few weeks’ impropriety following a marital row. Her second-eldest brother had told her exactly how the scandal had gone, and how only her father’s firm denial of the cockoldry and their popularity with their neighbors allowed her to go unremarked. 

Cullen, she decided, deserved better than a bastard girl like her, whose place in the family portrait was painted with redder hair and paler skin than she had ever posessed. And she deserved better than to pine for a man who couldn’t seem to make up his mind.

She dreamt of mountains she might one day summit, and called for the attack on Adamant fortress directly out of Caer Bronach on a sunny day by the lake.

They fought through demons and Wardens and after they breached the great gate, and when Cullen met her there he took her hand and squeezed it before he backed away and asked which tack she wished him to take.

“Keep the men safe. Take no undue risks,” she said, and he smiled. 

It was the last she saw of him for a very long time. She lost count of pride demons, dispair demons, shades and horrors by the time the archdemon appeared, and then she closed her eyes for a very long second and wished she had imagined the horrid creature. 

She had not. 

For a moment, in the Fade, she closed her eyes and willed herself to wake up in her bed. 

She did not. 

And for a moment, when she she learned Andraste had not touched so much as a hair upon her head, she thought, _Of course not. Why would I be special, just this once? Why would I have one single thing I deserved?_

Hawke volunteered to stay. And Evie let her. 

The Wardens she sent from Orlais, as far from Corypheus and his influence as they could get, as quickly as they could go. 

She came back to the Inquisition with cheeks reddened from the sun and a heart heavy with things she wished she hadn’t had to do. 

“But that’s the way of it, no?” Leliana said to her. “Someone must make the hard choices. Today, that someone is you.” 

She sent Erimond to the dungeons to rot, too valuable a resource to simply execute, and offered Ser Ruth a forgiveness she did not feel entitled to give. Afterward, she wandered. Greeted the folk brought to Skyhold to train her, saw them settled in their quarters. 

Visited with Mother Giselle and listened to her council--though it meant little when the woman had not _been_ through the depths of the Fade. Had not seen the thousand little fears threatening to eat her up from the inside, and the worries that curled beneath her breast and crackled ‘til they left her hollow. 

Evie dreamt of mountains, gray and lifeless things jutting up into the sky, and put herself outside to see them every chance she got. She wandered often unto Cullen’s office, to stop and chat or draw him outside for a game of chess or a spar in the ring when he looked pent-up and tense. This time he looked pensive, leaning over an open box on his desk, and she knocked twice on the open doorframe. 

He looked up, eyes watery and hands trembling a little. 

“I can come back,” she said. “I thought--” 

“No,” he said. “It’s no trouble.” 

Then he sighed, and trembled, and told her of the source of a Templar’s powers. That he no longer too the lyrium that bestowed them, though their allies almost all still did. “Which you’ll know, of course. The Order makes no secret of it to prospective recruits.”

Evie’s mouth went dry, and she straightened her spine and touched the philter box on Cullen’s desk. Just the edge, ignoring the knife and primer and the empty phial that would have held powdered lyrium, the empty space that would have held a small lyrium crystal. 

“I want to become a Templar,” she said. “I’ve spoken with Ser.”

“Why?”

“It’s what I’ve always wanted. To serve the Chantry, to serve Thedas--”

“You’re doing those things now,” Cullen said. 

He closed the box, and regarded her with a severity he had never used on her before, even when she teased or dallied on the practice court, made light of things he thought better approached with seriousness. 

“With a Templar’s abilities, I might--” She stopped. 

Cullen slipped his philter box into a drawer and closed it, locked it tight. 

“What might you do that you could not with any other training.”

“There are too many demons in the world, Cullen. I must be better-able to protect myself. Ser mentioned a vigil? He mentioned that sometimes, a Templar knight might sit with the initiate, to ensue that she is well through it, might-- ”

“Do not ask me to do so for you,” he said. “This is no easy life, to be undertaken on a whim--no, my apologies, that is unfair of me. I do not wish to see you--have you seen what lyrium does, in the end? How it robs you--”

“I know the dangers.” 

“And you still wish to go down this road.”

“I do.” 

Cullen sighed, and paced, and was quiet for a long time. “Evie,” he said, the first time he had used her given name--not _Herald_ or _Inquisitor_. “I cannot stop you, but i will not help you.”


End file.
